Thoughts while travelling

I travel a lot for work and often in hotels at night by myself it's a bit boring. Last night I'm sitting in a hotel club room having a quiet(ish) drink - this "ish" was mainly because of a group of Australians sitting nearby discussing different experiences of flights they had recently. After discussing the different seat configurations of Airbus and Boeing (yawn) one of them started on a recent flight where there had been a family with some kids running riot and the parent apparently unable to do anything to control them (thinks - message to all airlines - kids are best placed in the luggage hold).

The one of them said something about he would never have dared behave like that when he was a kid and suddenly the conversation became more interesting. Before I knew what was happening one of the guys was saying how often at his school if something happened to one of the kids in class and nobody would own up to be punished the teacher would go 'round and give the belt to everyone in the class apart from the victim, and how he thought that was really bad for the victim who had to watch it all. I've never been a fan of collective punishment and I could well see that the "victim" might end worse off as a lot of innocent kids got whacked and resented him/her for being the cause.

It also made me recall a story from a long time back when I was growing up. My parents were friendly with an older couple whose son had gone into teaching. I remember them saying once that the school he was in was a bit tough and on one occasion he'd taken his watch off during a class and it went missing. A search failed to find it and nobody owned up so in the end he had lined up the entire class (boys and girls) and caned every one of them but still didn't get his watch back. Amazing that this was ever acceptable I think. I'm not one of those who prefixes my website/blog with comments about not condoning the corporal punishment of minors because - so long as it's not done for sexual gratification - I think it has a place, but I would have expected parents to have been outraged if their son or daughter was caned or belted for something they hadn't done with this sort of "class action."

Back to the conversation in the hotel where one of the women in the group now added her story. She had two younger brothers and something (I didn't hear what) had gone wrong and they had been asked which of them was responsible with a threat that they might all be punished. She saw that her youngest brother was upset at the thought so she had owned up. However the other brother had then been ashamed and had admitted it was really him. The result was that their father had belted him for what he'd done wrong and then given her a good hiding for lying to try to cover up the truth. Now that does have some element of justice to it I suppose!